I turn to Marx as a poet, rather than an economist, to give me any hope for the past. The turbulences of the epochal capitalist accumulations of the 18th and 19th centuries help me to gather an internationalist understanding of where we find ourselves in the 21st century. I feel we suspected the Modern as a slick mediator of capitalist expansion far too late. I examine Modernism's relation to architecture; research the intervolved histories of the slave trade and the industrial revolution; celebrate grassroots religious, class and folk histories; and extol the proliferation of informal economies. I scour back through time to unearth quasi-utopic pasts and depend on proxy histories from pre-grain societies, esoteric rituals, alchemical processes, collective bargaining and revolutionary narratives to garner scraps of salvation. I see no futures only the past. Haiti is my sole speculative.